Something about an experience of beauty can draw a person upward, out of their normal existence, and into a new realm. In "Ode to a Nightingale," the nightingale's song represents the highest beauty. The bird is carefree, in a state of "full-throated ease" and self-forgetting ecstasy as it pours its whole soul into its music. This "immortal Bird" has a song that that has sounded down through the centuries with a beauty that never dies. It is transcendent, reaching beyond the limits of space and time.

This beauty pulls the speaker beyond himself. At first, he seems to sink into a dullness as he listens and longs for the fulfillment of the beauty he hears. He wants to embrace it and flow with it, join it in its transcendence, far away from the pains and cares of life. The beauty of the nightingale's song causes an ache within him because he cannot grasp it, and this is often true of the human experience in which beauty seems fleeting and just out of reach.

Yet, there are ways for people to encounter and embrace the beauty symbolized by the nightingale's song. First is poetry (or Poesy, as the speaker calls it). It offers wings that allow people to fly after beauty, create it, and see the world anew and wonderfully (as the poet notices Queen-Moon surrounded by "her starry Fays").

The speaker also communes with beauty through the heightened awareness of his senses. As he walks in the dark garden, he smells the flowers in their sweetness, enhancing the data of his senses with his imagination. He envisions the flowers around him in his mind and drinks their "dewy wine" into his spirit. In poetry and the vividness of sense and imagination, and through the voice of the nightingale, the speaker catches glimpses of something beyond this world, of magic and "faery lands."

But while beauty is immortal and powerful, it does not last, at least not in this world. The speaker is left with a fading vision as the nightingale flies away. He does not know if he has been awake or asleep; his imagination has failed, and the beauty of the music has retreated. Yet, in a way, it remains, for the poet's reflections have been distilled into a poem of great beauty that allows readers to experience the transcendence of beauty every time they read it.

In "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats presents life and death in something of a paradoxical fashion. He turns readers' expectations upside down in his meditations on this theme so that they can view the realities of life and death in new, often shocking ways. First, the poem opens with a dull, empty view of life. The speaker is nearly sleeping, drowsy, numb, and in pain; he hears the nightingale's song, but it fails to heal his heartache. Life is too burdensome, and he merely wants to escape.

The speaker longs to escape from life because it is simply too painful, "where men sit and hear each other groan" in sorrow and misery. The old slip away with shaking limbs and gray hair. The young die, pale and thin and ill. All is despair; even Beauty and Love fade and pine for the past.

This outlook is not a pleasant or hopeful picture of life. The speaker is actually "half in love with easeful Death" as a means of leaving behind the pain of life. When life is misery, death is attractive, at least for the speaker. He cannot find a way to conquer the anguish and gloom of life, so he reaches out toward what he views as the peace of death.

Some readers may be disturbed by the poet's musings about life and death, especially since they contrast greatly with many messages of the modern world, which present life as the ultimate good and death as something to be avoided for as long as possible. Yet, the poet does not intend to provoke despair. Instead, he aims for a balanced view.

The poet offers a note of hope beyond the despair of life and the so-called ease of death, and that is the immortality of the nightingale. While individual birds may die, the nightingale's beautiful song, a gift of the natural world and a representation of human art, lives on. While the beauty of a particular person fades away, the beauty of nature and art remains forever, across the generations and for all time. It inspires amid the sorrows of life and perhaps even a glimpse of something beyond death.